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Hello everyone, this is Asclepius. I’m very pleased to introduce another guest narrator, this time Isaiah, from the SotA community. He will be presenting an enthralling story in three parts – here is the first part, entitled “The Cursed Mind, by the Vagabond” Background music is “Evasion” by Matthew Pablo at www.matthewpablo.com

THE CURSED MIND, by the Vagabond

To anybody who reads this,

I know that I’ve been cursed. All these seemingly unrelated people are all members of an underground Obsidian Order. I use to think the Obsidians were just a historical group, and nothing of any real significance, as you might have thought. I also never thought of myself as a conspiracy theorist.

This is where it gets weird. It began one day as I spoke with one of the guards in front of Owl’s Head. He said I was an outlander, then he changed his mind. He smiled at me, turned his head, and then he looked back with a smile and winked. I looked in the direction that the guard turned his head. I looked closely, and scratch marks on the wall said, “The Order welcomes you”. I thought it was just graffiti, but I kept noticing more small words in town on the walls. One said, “We are watching,” and another said, “We are many”. Every time I noticed these markings I had just been thinking about the Obsidian Order.

I went to the pub, and a new bartender I never met before served me a drink. I talked to him and he said, “Oh, I’m part of a new guild that came to town the other day. We need of some fresh minds to do some magical research.” After saying this, he winked at me exactly like the guard at the front gate. He looked over at a table of four people sitting adjacent to me, and they all looked back and smiled. At this point I realized that it is possible that I’m being followed, and that these people were some how inviting me into their group, but trying to keep it very secret.

I was excited at first, but one day I made a huge mistake. I directly asked one of the people I thought might be a member of the Obsidian Order, if in fact they were a member of the Obsidian Order. They laughed and denied it, but looked at me with furrowed brows. After this people started looking at me strangely every place I went. I thought, maybe I made a mistake by being so direct. Perhaps a group like the Obsidian Order would want to keep their existence a secret I thought. Were they able to read my thoughts? I don’t know. It seemed like everybody was against me, and that they were pushing evil thoughts into my head. I couldn’t bare the anxious thoughts, so I left town and have lived on the streets ever since.

I know that these things seem like they could just easily be made up by my mind, but they aren’t! It really happened, and it is unexplainable. I write this so that anybody reading this, will please watch out, they are all around us. My whole life was ruined. They made me look crazy so nobody would believe me. Just don’t get involved.

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Hello everyone, this is Asclepius. I’m delighted to welcome another guest narrator, JLWChambers, who is also an avid podcaster. He is bringing us a great story by zerowon, entitled True Fear – True Evil. Background music is “Evasion” by Matthew Pablo, at www.matthewpablo.com.

The night was black. So black, that Nomad felt as though the absence of light was a sign that the stars and the heavens had forever abandoned him in that dreary tract of forest. The trees barely visible, seemed to howl as the cold night air blew between their branches further magnifying the haunting feeling of desolation. For Nomad knew that no beneficent god would ever allow such a disturbing place to exist within the gaze of the righteous heavens and it t’was by that logic that Nomad knew he must be blindly trekking through the space between the living and the damned.

What to do? What could he do? The minutes stretched on for hours and the hours melted into days. No sign of life, no sign of the world he knew – Nothing but cold and unrelenting darkness.

It was from within that primal part of Nomad’s body that the true fear unchecked and flooded his logical senses. The fear grew into an unsettling feeling so deeply rooted into the darkest pit of Nomad’s brain thus paralyzing all of his thoughts other than survival. It was within this darkness that Nomad encountered true evil. A lord undone, a life bereft of humanity, a creature so foul that it could only be perceived as a lich.

With steady speed the lich closed on Nomad raking its skeletal hands across his chest with fury. Nomad frantically tried to fight back but it was to no avail. It became clear as the darkness crept into Nomad’s consciousness that one cannot encounter such menacing evil and hope to survive. It was in that blackened forest of evil that Nomad’s candle was extinguished.